Dad from Autobiography of a White Boy by Christopher Mahon copyright 2004 All Rights Reserved

Dad came out of Central High School in Scranton, where he met my mother, played basketball in the midnight basketball leagues, loved to swim, worked as an usher in the local movie theater. Then he went off to war, not eligible for some physical reason for the Air Force, though he wanted to fly planes (your bite isn’t straight enough, they told him, for those long dives), so he went into the Army, to boot camp, and then traveled up and down the coast, fort to fort, taking courses. He was invited to join officer’s school but, at nineteen, rejected the offer, explaining to his superior that the older soldiers would not respect such a young man leading them in combat. Eventually he became a Combat MP and crossed the ocean. He loved commanding drills, telling officers at the crossroads that they were traveling in the wrong direction, pointing at his map. We’d always hear stories of the winter woods during the Battle of the Bulge, of the saddest sight he ever saw, the young dead American soldier lying face up in the stream, water flowing in the bullet wound on one side of his temple, and flowing out on the other side. He talked of firing guns through the hedgerows, being blown out of a jeep, riding through the mountains in another jeep during a starry night. There was the story of escorting German prisoners through the snow, and the other soldier with him wanting to have the Germans take off their shoes so they could double-time them through the snow and then shoot them if they fell.

"That’s not right," my dad said.

And he’d tell us later why his fellow soldier was so angry at the Germans.

"He was from Boston," Dad told us. "He wanted to be home for Christmas."

Much later in his life he told us, finally, that he’d actually landed on a beach during D-Day, got wounded above the eye, was sent to a ship for medical aid, and then came back to the beach. This was around the time that the movie Private Ryan came out, and he went to his see it with my younger brother Mike.

Calling from California, I asked him how he liked the movie.

"That’s how it was," he said.

And how was that?

"Very deathly."

At least he could swim when he climbed out of the landing craft, he said.

Some others just sank to the bottom.

I believe all of his other stories.

But even now, I’m not sure if he ever actually landed on the Normandy beach on D-Day.

*

After the war, Dad finished his last three years at the University of Scranton in a year and a half, taking classes, as he always told us, on "nights, days, and weekends."

He considered becoming an accountant but a recruiter convinced him to be a salesman.

"You can make more money as a salesman," the recruiter told him.

Dad started with Burrough’s Corporation as a salesman in 1948.

He sold adding machines and check forms for banks.

In those days, he’d carry adding machines up the stairs of office buildings, to work up a sweat, so that when he appeared before his potential customers, they’d see what a hard-working man he was.

And he was.

In 1958, Dad became the number one salesman in the country for the Todd Division of Burrough’s Corporation.

His ambition in those days was matched only by his energy.

Fellow salesmen used to have a joke about my dad.

They’d say that when he came into a bank, and the bank manager would waive him away because he didn’t want to talk to a salesman that day, the bank manager would say to my dad, as he waived, "Go away. I’ve got a hundred guys like you."

And Jerry Mahon would say to himself as he waved back:

"I’ve got a thousand like you."

He won lots of awards.

Among the certificates and the cash prizes, he also won a beautiful mahogany desk and the mahogany bed set he and my mother slept on. He’d built up his territory, the company would bring in three salesmen to replace him, and then he’d move on to the next territory.

Once I asked my mother why she married my father.

"He had so much drive," Mom said.

And, looking back, years later, my Aunt Quinta spoke about him.

"Well, you know Jerry," she said. "He always wanted to go to the top."

*

In 1958, while my dad was establishing himself as a top salesman in his company, his younger brother Bobby was dying a slow brutal death from colon cancer.

It was a bad time to get colon cancer.

There were concerns about insurance.

There wasn’t the kind of medical treatment you could obtain now.

I’ve unearthed only pieces of this most important of family stories, pieces regarding the relationship between my father and his brother, regarding the whole family dynamics during this dark time, when surely star lights of family love shined through as they still shine through, regarding even the personal histories of the family before the hospitals and the doctors figured so prominently in the family background and foreground..

The few stories I’ve heard of Bobby are intermingled with the equally mysterious stories I’ve heard about my father’s relationship with his mother: Dad never got along with his mother except, perhaps, in those very early days when he was a child and, as family stories have it, was spoiled almost rotten as the favorite eldest son.

After Dad returned from the war, his mother apparently tried to oppressively intervene in his life. Dad’s parents had divorced by then — he got a letter in Europe one day informing him that his parents were going to split — and his mother was insistently concerned for her own welfare. Once, after the war, she marched Dad down to the University of Scranton, while he was still a student, and instructed one of the Jesuits to tell my father that he couldn’t possibly marry my mother because he had to stay home and take care of his mother.

Those days were mixed with happiness and despair. On the morning of my parent’s wedding, my mother’s father, dressed in his best dark suit, looked at his only daughter and declared, "You’re making the biggest mistake of your life."

*

My uncle Bobby was able to deal with the situation, at times, perhaps more gracefully.

When their time for matrimony came, Bobby and Quinta decided to avoid the kind of family squabbles that erupted over my own parents’ marriage.

They eloped — to Tom’s Ferry, New Jersey, and then sent my parents a telegram.

"Fooled you!" they said.

*

Bobby had been a soldier, too.

He was four years younger than my father and so did not experience any military battles during World War II. But he became a sergeant. And after his military service he became a salesman as well.

In his last year, Bobby’s cancer became for my father a nervous shock that ran along the telephone wires and shortened the breath of his voice in conversation. What could it have been like, talking to family and friends, probing the possibilities of what they could do and the tragedies of what they could not? I imagine him speaking not only to his family but to his fellow salesmen. I’m imagining that all such men were especially close during those days, after the war, that there was a great silent fraternity that no longer exists among your average white male.

Bobby was only twenty-nine when he departed from this world, leaving behind him a wife and four children, my cousins.

As my father began his journey throughout the country in search of better and better jobs, his brother’s wife Quinta raised the children by herself, with the help of her own family. We used to visit my aunt and cousins on River Street when we came back to Pennsylvania in the summers, years later. By this time Aunt Quinta was teaching at Marywood College and would later rise to become chairperson of her department. Once, after one of those trips, my cousin Carol Anne came to visit us at our home for a week. She spent a week around my father, seeing his energy, his unique sense of humor. And when she returned to Pennsylvania, she asked her own mother:

"Was Dad like him?"

*

"Oh, Bobby," my uncle Leo would say. "You could have a decent conversation with Bobby."

Leo was my mother’s brother. Leo had been a good friend of Bobby’s.

They were the same age. They both went to the University of Scranton together.

Yet my uncle Leo’s comment said as much about my father as it did about my father’s brother.

Leo was talking about how irascible Dad could be, how impossible it was, sometimes, even to have a simple conversation with him. He was saying that Bobby was much more sociable than my dad, much easier in conversation, much more graceful with people and with words. It must have been true. Both my father and my uncle Bobby were good looking. Dark hair. Dark eyes. Sharp features. Handsome, in the way that only men in the 1940s, dressed in their suits and hats, could be handsome. But some of those pictures of Bobby I’ve seen: he looked something like an angel — beyond having a touch of the poet; he had a touch of heaven in his eyes and on his skin. He was a beautiful man. Quinta, no doubt, agreed. The last time she saw my father she reminded him of the fact: "Oh, I married the better looking brother!" she said. "Yes, but Bobby was better looking!" And yes, it must have been true, and you could feel, in Quinta’s words, the long love for her husband, her children’s father, lasting through the decades.

Dad was never forthcoming about his experiences with Bobby when they were both kids, growing up together in the same house. Dad wasn’t one to talk or think about such things. Though he brooded deeply on his own personal failures, in many ways, other parts of the past were simply that: the past. Or maybe it simply had to do with the fact that he and his brother were four years apart. Dad must have been very different from Bobby, though in so many ways I now wish I knew more about their similarities.

They were brothers, after all.

I sometimes think my father’s drive to success during the 1950s was fueled by his brother’s sickness, by the implication of the sickness, which was nothing less than death itself. Perhaps he had seen enough death in the war and could not bear to take his own brother’s dying more deeply into his own heart, in the great stillness that mortality calls for; he had to run quickly into life, and into the pursuit of a prosperity upon which depended all of our futures.

Perhaps it was something larger.

Look at our history.

It may be a foundation of the American lifestyle: a fear of mortality; a running away from death.

Dad put his mother behind him, too.

In those days there continued to be blow ups between my father and his mother. The ultimate consequence of them was that my father stopped speaking to her. They didn’t speak for thirty years, which meant my father also did not speak with his younger sister, who lived with her mother. There was an attempt at reconciliation during one Easter but it was short-lived. All the old grudges fell back into place and the silent battle resumed. When the news of my paternal grandmother’s death finally arrived to my father, years and years later, it arrived as a surprise, as a message whose true, deep meaning had been lost years and years before, amidst the many blinded forms of human communication or miscommunication..

His sister called, from the opposite end of the country, from the opposite end of a life, to tell him the news, and then quickly replaced the telephone.

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